


Slipping in Between

by seperis



Category: Smallville
Genre: M/M, Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-07-03
Updated: 2004-07-03
Packaged: 2017-12-13 15:08:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,244
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/825720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seperis/pseuds/seperis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Remix of Rivka T's "Golden Rule".  He couldn't remember, but he *knew*.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Slipping in Between

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Golden Rule](https://archiveofourown.org/works/41659) by [rivkat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rivkat/pseuds/rivkat). 



> Cjandre beta'ed and encouraged.

There's a moment.

It's an old memory, just a flashed second of white teeth and golden skin, green eyes like rain-wet leaves. So vivid, it had to have been yesterday, had to have been only seconds ago. 

Clark always moved so fast.

Always that one step ahead. Always slipping just barely out of his sight, just beyond the reach of his fingertips. Always, always going places he could never follow.

The man in his bed's slim and golden and his eyes are hidden under black lashes. A loose, graceless sprawl, like a kid in a loft, a boy in his own bed at home, edging Lex toward the floor with every heaving, trusting sigh, big arm around his waist like an anchor in an imaginary storm.

It's an old memory, and a new one, because Lex remembered with a flash of lightning in the sky outside his window, Clark's forehead pressed against his arm. There's a man, and a night like this, and a sickening sense of suffocation that ends on a sharp breath.

There's a man, and a memory, and then there's nothing at all but absence.

Clark shifts beside him, and Lex sits up and looks at the telephone, thinking of the messages he never listened to, the notes he never read, the files he never opened. He thinks of his father's shouted words, and the glassy-green pulse of kryptonite, the way it flushed Clark's skin, and he remembers sitting in the lab, working on those formulas for hours and his fingers drew equations that he'd never seen, twisted columns of alphanumeric code that resolved into something frighteningly familiar.

He knew how to counter Lionel's Kryptonite. Child's play, so easy, he knew how it was done, because his fingers knew how it was created. His hands drew the math that backed the science, theoretical chemistry and physics were practical facts. He looked and he read and he knew, and he didn't know how, but he knew.

That combination, that sequence, that the computer ran for him time and again, as familiar as his own face, as indelible as a fingerprint, as damning as a single strand of DNA.

He knew how to fix it, knew how to compensate, knew the math because he knew the signature of the maker, written into every simulation he ran. Imprinted into file after file he never read, every disk he never scanned, all the accounts that he'd never seen.

It was his own.

* * *

"What's the last thing you remember?" 

"I - the wedding reception, Helen's little cousin Sophie stepped on her train and Helen fell down, the flowers went all over. She was laughing. Then -" He stopped, frustrated. A split image, of Helen in creamy silk, moving like water under his hands. She'd worn it for him the night before, laughing, we don't need luck, Lex. We have each other. 

We have each other.

He tasted salt on the back of his tongue, something green and bitter and wet, and when he looked up, Clark was watching him with wide green eyes. Then he looked away, flashing to the floor, shoulders slumping.

"Something happened to Helen." It was a car. A plane. Drowning in blue-green silk, like her dress, liquid and endless, saying her name. He couldn't remember, but he *knew*.

"Lex." His voice cracked, and Lex felt the world shift. Helen. God, Helen. No. It--no. He'd do anything not to hear, insane thoughts of getting up and walking away, because if Clark said it, really *said* it, it might become real. "Lex, Helen died ten years ago." 

* * *

He's erased more messages than he can count, fucking cell phone ambushes and email bombs, promising him answers to questions that shouldn't even exist. And God, he's tired, in ways he never knew existed at twenty-two, a decade ago, a few minutes ago.

Clark sleeps like the dead, and Lex likes that, makes it easy to slip out from under his arm, press warm feet into the soft thickness of the rug. His head aches in that phantom way that nothing but alcohol eases, but he's seen Clark's sharp eyes measure the decanters level, knows that Clark watches him. It's comforting, addictive--Clark's full attention is a rare thing, a powerful thing, with heat and thickness and feeling, being wrapped in the folds of the thickest blanket, warm and precious and safe. Frightening, maybe, if Lex wasn't who he was. Obsession was like that. You understood what it was or you didn't. You accepted it or you got the fuck out of the way. There were never any in-between spaces for men like Clark, for men like him. Nowhere that there was merely peace.

He thinks that once upon a time, he'd wanted that. Helen had understood. He wonders if Silvia had.

Stepping over discarded jeans and something cheaply cotton that smells of Clark and a long night bent over a desk, Lex pushes open his laptop. The scroll of his father's email slides by his eyes--what the fuck, does he set the thing to fucking email him every hour--and Lex thinks of the man outside his building, yelling at him like a fishwife from a spectacularly bad community theatre performance, Clark's hand on the small of his back, whispering in his ear. 

Autodelete's easiest, and Lex stares at the empty inbox for a few long minutes. His cell phone, his home phone, his office phone, will have more. Poisonous words that slick his mind with slime, murmuring about business and money and power, political aspirations and Superman and death. All meaningless against the warm reality of Clark in his bed; shadowy and insubstantial when he can still taste Clark in his mouth.

All meaningless compared to the shortest note, a piece of fucking *paper* left on his desk, and he'll crucify the person who did it, who left it, who allowed it to exist, innocently white on top of disks with agriculture projections, payroll records, nothing but a single damning line that froze his hand. He couldn't even close his fingers to crumple and throw it away.

It's in his briefcase, with a time and a date sketched below, from a phone call only seconds later. Fucking sociopathic bastard. Like he *knew*. And hell, maybe he did.

_*I know what happened to your wife.*_

* * *

"You didn't mention that I was a widower twice over."

Clark froze, fork half-way to his mouth, and Lex had never seen that before, and he remembered Clark's single-minded intensity in the face of food, any food, all food. Like a magnet drawn north, a man to a pretty woman, or the call of cliffs to lemmings; they had nothing on Clark and dinner.

Clark looked at him, so blank it was as good as a confession, though of what, Lex didn't know. 

Clark took the last bite of meatloaf like a man leaping from a sinking ship. "I didn't really know what to say." His mouth worked in a parody of chewing, swallowing awkwardly, forced casual, edged with concern. Lex almost believed him.

"What was she like?" The images on the computer had been sketchy--an impression bright red hair and dark green eyes, the color of wet spring leaves. Full, mobile mouth. A camera catching her from an angle, her hand wrapped around his. Long fingers with short, bitten nails. A tilt to her head that reminded him of his mother. 

"She was really smart, intense. You were - I wasn't sure when you got time to see each other, you were both working so hard." 

Lex listened to all the things Clark didn't say. A seventeen year old boy that Lex once knew looked like that once upon a time.

"Did she know about you?" He wondered what his face betrayed, but Clark was staring at the floor like it had a script for this moment that he had to follow or die. Maybe that was for the best.

"I've learned over the years that every person who knows is in danger." A long second, and Lex read a lifetime's worth of pain into every syllable, wondered who had hurt him like that, made him tighten, so every muscle was like stone. The Clark he knew had been afraid, but only of the unknown. This one feared what he knew--it showed in the deep lines around his mouth, the eyelids lowered over eyes gone dark and bleak. Emotional scarring was only invisible to those who didn't have their complement. 

He knew the kind of hurt that left those kinds of scars and hated who had done that to him. Fixing his eyes on the wall behind Clark's lowered head, Lex drew a slow breath and asked another question.

* * *

Clark wakes up slow and grumbly, and Lex finds it cute, endearing that the farm-fresh boy who once dragged himself up at five now rolls over in bed and hides his head beneath a pillow, groaning against the sunlight. Cute and fracturing, reminding him of how time has passed, how it passes.

The beep of Clark's cell phone brings him upright, though. Reaching for the bedside table, Clark flicks it on with a thumb, and Lex watches the slow stiffening of the long muscles, the tension that's palpable, like the air itself thickens. He knows this feeling, this warning, this second that lasts and lasts as Clark listens, moving farther and farther away from him with every passing breath.

When the phone slides to the bed, Superman turns around to look at Lex. Clark peers out from behind the dark eyes, pleading without pleading at all. 

"I know. World to save, people to rescue, etcetera." Closing down his email program, Lex watches Clark stand up uncertainly, still between people, a little awkward when he reaches for his jeans, a disarrayed mess beside the bed, where Lex left them when he peeled them off Clark's hips. He can taste Clark's skin on his tongue, hear his soft pants and even softer words.

"Terrorists," he offers obliquely, a shift of long muscles as he reaches for his shirt. Lex remembers unbuttoning it, soft cheap cotton sliding between his hands when he pulled it off Clark. A body memory so strong his hands slide the length of his wool pants to feel the friction again. "I--"

"Just go. Be back for dinner?" It's not a given, even when it should be, and Lex loses himself a little in the unexpected domesticity. He always does. There's nothing more surreal than conversations like this, nothing that quite touches the pure wonder of it. Clark grins and reaches for his socks, rolling onto his back like a kid, feet in the air as he pulls them on. A turn of his head, flashing a smile, and Lex smiles back, almost following him to the bed. Which would--not expedite anything. At least, nothing with terrorists, and only Superman can save the hostages this time. "They take advantage of you."

"The terrorists?" Clark hastily buttons his shirt, feet finding the floor, rolling onto his feet in a single liquid movement. "I don't think they like me that much--"

"The government." Watching Clark night after night after night, wandering off to save the world from itself, like it couldn't so much as turn without him to keep the rotation in order. It's ridiculous, and Lex stands up then, crossing to straighten the mess Clark's making of his tie. It's wrinkled, but there's no help for that. "We got by fine before you."

"People died." Clark's face darkens, and Lex can't help running his hands over the smooth cotton-covered shoulders. Clark feels responsibility too deeply.

"And sometimes, they didn't. And sometimes, we didn't *get* into situations where people could die." Though not often, Lex admits privately, but watching Clark go out every night to clean up messes he had no part in creating, watching him come back--come home--some nights, a haunted look filling his eyes, curling up against Lex like he was the only anchor in the world. Lex thinks they must have had this conversation a hundred times before, maybe a thousand, because every time he feels Clark shiver, he wants to say it. Stay. Don't go. Don't tear yourself apart so much.

Ask a mountain to move, or the wind to stop. 

"Your shoes are in the hall." Lex steps away, forcing his fingers from Clark's warm body. Breathe. "Be back for dinner."

"I will be." A kiss, simple and quick, almost casual, but so much meant in it. The ease, the simplicity, the *normality*. Lex thinks of a thousand times he fantasized about Clark in his youth, sex and heat and driving need, but it never came here, never came to this place where a soft brush of lips meant everything. It meant 'I know you.' It meant 'I'll be back'. And above all, it meant 'I love you".

* * *

He visited Silvia's grave. Clark took him, shifting uncomfortably only feet away, watching Lex like he expected Lex to--something. He's still not sure what, just remembers staring at the headstone, the one that wasn't there, for a wife who died in a plane accident a decade ago. He couldn't mourn Silvia, though he tried, he wanted to, he must have loved her, God, she shared his house and his bed and his life, like Helen, but nothing stirred.

So like the cold-blooded man Lois' articles painted him to be, and Lex took a breath, stepping back. "Were you here?"

Behind him, Clark swallowed. "I couldn't be." Clark didn't say anything more, and Lex turned his head, looking at the perfect features set in that badly formed mask of hopeful blankness. Clark had learned so many tricks to hide inside himself, but the Kansas farmboy was still there. Hard lines of mouth and bunching muscles of his jaw. 

"Did I love her?" Did he? There were questions he knew Clark would never answer, just by the flush on his skin that betrayed him as the still body didn't. So Clark, to know how to hide everything but the important things. "Was I--were we--"

"No!" A single step, and Lex saw the big hands clench. "You never betrayed her."

But maybe, I betrayed you. 

* * *

"Where did you get these?"

Dad just smiles, reaching out long fingers to tap the photographs spread across the desk. 

His hands don't shake, because he may be brain damaged, but he's not stupid.

It's strange, how his eyes just flicker over the other files, the passwords, the disks stacked by the desk, because his father knows, has always known, what buttons to push, where Lex is most vulnerable, and unlawful genetic tests, secret underground labs, all the accoutrements of a supervillian's comic lair, can't compare to this. That's for later. This is for now.

"All this time," Lionel says calmly, like a cat playing with a mouse. "That wonderful performance for the masses you both did Those long chats in every cafe and restaurant in Metropolis."

_*"We were--we were after, Lex," Clark murmured, but he didn't look at the headstone. "It was--we've always been friends. It just--happened."*_

"I did."

Lionel looks at him, like a shark scenting blood. "Really?" And Dad always did have great dramatic timing, skidding a picture across the table, and Lex knows, *knows* it's a mistake to look, to care, to have agreed to this fucking masterpiece of emotional manipulation, he *knows* so much better, Clark must have--

Must have--

_*"It was when you wanted to see me cook. You said that anyone Mom trained had to be at least competent and I told you that Lois had nine-one-one on speed dial from when I made her fried chicken, but you sat there in my kitchen and said you figured that you'd survive. And you were cutting up chicken and making a mess of your shirt. You didn't know any more than I did."*_

He and Clark on the penthouse balcony, only a few months ago. So normal, unimpeachable, no one would think anything of it except for that one thing. The look on Clarks' face, brilliant under a warm Metropolis summer sun. 

He doesn't owe his father any explanations at all. And he shouldn't have come here. "Get the fuck out."

"Son." Lionel's voice is slick and slow, like the thinnest sheen of oil on his skin. A filthy feeling. "You were destined for great things." His hands indicate the files on the floor, and Lex tries not to think what that means. "To let yourself be--used--"

"He had nothing to do with her death." And God, he sounds so *sure*, because he is.

_*"Well, long story short, I burned the chicken and you sent for pizza and we ate on the balcony because the entire apartment was full of smoke. And--you had tomato sauce all smeared by your mouth and I--I mean, it was like--and I rubbed it away and you looked at me. Like you--and. Well. I kissed you.*_

_*"I kissed you, and you told me after you thought you'd waited your entire life for me to do that. And I told you that I had, too."*_

"Maybe not. Maybe he just had someone do it for him. A favor for a favor." So much implication stacked on implication on top of spite. Dad really doesn't like those new suits of Clark's. He has nothing to counteract them. "What do you think *really* happened to her? Or to you?"

"You have no idea what you're talking about." Mercy would enjoy throwing him out. Lex would enjoy watching it. Pressing down on the button beneath the edge of his desk, Lex watches his father rise, unhurried, like he doesn't know that Mercy's favorite hobby involves breaking bones.

"Maybe you should ask where he was that night. Either night." A last picture slides across the desk, and Lex almost closes his eyes before he sees it, almost, but not quite. A silent night, the flash of red and blue in the corner, and his own body on the ground. Lex takes a slow breath. "Would you like to know what Dr. Morton saw outside your lab, Lex?"

_*"I love you, Lex."*_

* * *

"Tell me another story about us," Lex asked, rolling onto his side, drawing a possessive hand down Clark's arm. Beautiful like this, messy hair and flushed skin. Whatever Krypton did to make these kids, Lex could only wish they'd passed on the secret with Clark. It almost seemed unfair to have something so perfect all to himself. Almost.

"I'm still kinda bitter over the poetry thing." Clark stretched, muscles ripping under golden flesh, and Lex tried to keep his mind on the prize. "I still can't open a book of poetry without giggling, you know."

"Try Silvia Plath one day," Lex murmured. "Set to--oh. I don't know, Lady Lazarus and Hotel California."

Clark groaned and buried his head in his pillow. "You enjoyed that way too much."

"What else did I enjoy?"

Turning his head, Clark's mouth set in a thoughtful line, eyes dark, and a big hand brushed against his cheek, so gently, impossible to believe that hand could bend metal like butter. The kiss was slow and sweet and careful, and Lex pushes Clark over on his back, straddling his waist to just look. "What else, Clark?"

Clark's smile was bright enough to light the room, arching his hips enough for Lex to feel it, his cock brushing against Lex's. Eyes closing, body shivering at the feeling. "You enjoyed me."

* * *

He goes through everything; he's always been a fast reader. Genetic experiments. Human subjects. Trafficking, which seems on the order of playing with leggos compared to the others. His experiments, and God, does that explain the designs Lionel's been using on Clark..

None of it matches the man Clark told him about. The photograph on his desk doesn't match the man Lex fucks.

He'd never asked how Sylvia died and now he wonders how Clark would have answered.

* * *

_*It's an old memory, just a flashed second of white teeth and golden skin, green eyes like rain-wet leaves. So vivid, it had to have been yesterday, had to have been only seconds ago.*_

He remembered tonight, a lap of files, a stack of disks, the beep of a computer, and the smells of a clear, cold night coming through the open windows.

Clark always moved so fast.

_*A blur of red and blue, from a picture on his desk. Wet green eyes and golden skin. So vivid, it has to have been yesterday, but it was only months ago.*_

"What's wrong?"

Lex stares at the papers littering his desk. The pen bends beneath his fingers. He remembers..... 

"Lex?" 

Prying his fingers free, he drops the pen, pressing his palm to his knee to stop the shaking. "Is something the matter, Clark?" 

"Yes." Leaf-green eyes stare at him from under dark lashes. Curious and evaluating and afraid. "You're acting weird." 

Lex bites into the laugh, and Clark's eyes widen. "Define 'weird' for us. You and I aren't exactly bastions of normalcy, are we?"

_*Clark had been no one he knew. Unfamiliar in blue and red, but familiar, and now he knows how the uniform feels when its peeled away from warm, living skin, but then, he didn't.*_

"You had a visit from your father, didn't you? And he gave you some crap about living up to expectations." 

The amusement's as familiar as the uniform, as the boyish stoop of Clark's shoulders beneath his cape. Forgetting Superman and being just Clark in some silly spandex get-up that didn't fool anyone who knew what to look for.

"Not in so many words." 

Clark throws up his hands in exaggerated frustration, but Lex doesn't miss the way he relaxes. "What a jerk! I mean, I didn't exactly see him running the world when he was your age. It's ridiculous. He's trying to grind you down because he doesn't want to admit that you've already become a better, more important man than he'll ever be." 

Lex closes his eyes. "Thanks to you." 

"No. You've always made your own way, Lex. I'm just glad to be by your side." 

"Are you." 

"Did Lionel - did he say something about us?" 

"No, but I find it interesting that you think he would. Apparently Dr. Morris, the man who gave me my most recent concussion, got a little further with his story at LuthorCorp than he did at LexCorp. According to my father, these are files he took with him when his experiments were terminated." 

"He's making it all up, elaborating on that poor man's delusions." 

_*Angry. He remembers that. This man, Clark and Superman both, stalking to him with reddened eyes and he remembers his own voice, low and cool, saying....*_

"I see." 

"When was the last time your father told you the truth?" 

Papers scatter over his feet like falling leaves. "Oh, my father always uses a heavy dose of truth. All the most successful liars do. It's just the - context - that he manipulates." 

"He's trying to play you again. What did he want?" 

"He said he wanted to keep LexCorp at the forefront of the field of genetic manipulation. He gave me a rather long list of projects that, he assured me, LexCorp was already deeply involved in. Unfortunately, the list could also have functioned as a guide to violating every precept of the Nuremberg Code. Of course, I told him I didn't know what he was talking about. The funny thing is, for once, I meant it." His hands are shaking so badly he can barely think. God, Clark.

_*...and he was flying through the air, unable to breathe, barely able to think, but this moment, this second, he'd never seen coming. A shocked second of staring into Superman's eyes....*_

"What did you do?" 

"Kicked him out, naturally. But he still won, since I've been looking at these files for hours, wondering." 

"You shouldn't let him -" 

"The truth, Clark. Were those real projects? Did I intend to remake the world in my image? Were we really allies, behind a facade of enmity? Or did you just take your chance to change the story until it read the way you wanted?" 

Green eyes hold his, unflinching. So like the boy on the farm, the man who shares his bed. "What do you want me to say, Lex? If the situation were reversed, what would you want to tell me?" 

Lie. You've done it a thousand times, more times than I can count, more times than I'll ever know. Lie to me.

His hands close over Lex's, pulling him closer, and Clark smells like the wind outside, like a long night flying through the atmosphere, nitrogen and ozone and a warm summer night. Clark's lips are soft against his ear.

"What you believe - that's the truth." 

_*--and nothing but silence after.*_

_*He woke up in a cold room with Clark standing over him and telling him that Helen was dead.*_

Clark's arms slide around him, warm and safe, and Lex stares over his shoulder at the desk, at the photograph of his own death, hidden beneath a history he never wants to claim.

He can destroy it in the morning. All of it. And anything else that gets in their way.

"We're going to change the world," Clark says against his ear, and Lex closes his eyes.

He thinks they will.


End file.
